Monday, January 21, 2013

I've seen The Crow so many times that I never need to watch it again. I've internalized it. It's a part of me.

It is a beautiful film. There isn't anything like it, beyond Alex Proyas' follow up Dark City.
It also carries an extra edge because the film's star, Brandon Lee,
died making it in a horrific shooting accident. Fourteen-year-old me was
a martial arts movie nut. I'd been studying shotokan karate for a year
or two and I became one of those white kids who wore Bruce Lee
tee-shirts. I'd seen Brandon Lee's big premiere Rapid Fire and I
was excited to see what else he could do. I was devastated when I heard
what happened. I bought every magazine covering the story, from People
Magazine to Black Belt, and I devoured every scrap of information on
what happened, as if information could provide control over grief. By
the end, I came to the conclusion that it was a dislodged shell casing
propelled by the gunpowder from a blank, plus it was the dark juju from a
film featuring such dark subject matter, plus it was the secret masters
of the martial arts world getting revenge on the Lee family for Bruce
introducing martial arts secrets to the world.

The Crow
came along during the right time of my life. I was really into horror
and the occult. I was creeping into my goth phase. I had a headful of
fairy tales, an angsty heart, no sense of scale or irony, and a mean
streak fused with an adolescent's desperate desire to be loved.

The
movie is a fairy tale. After a couple are murdered for nebulous reasons
involving fighting tenant evictions and slum lords, the boyfriend comes
back as a half-insane revenant. Guided by his spirit-crow, he butchers
his assailants more-or-less effortlessly before returning to the grave
with his angelic girlfriend. It's a story of True Love. Eric and Shelly
are Meant To Be Together and they can't rest until he Puts The Wrong
Things Right.

I'm not entirely sure when the film is supposed to
take place but I assume it's one of those five minutes in the future
kind of things. The Detroit in the film can't exist in real life. It's
always night and the city is almost pure obsidian. Everything is wet and
dirty and broken. The people are either junkies or sociopathic thrill
killers or Ernie Hudson. The crime lord behind it all reminds me less of
Scarface and more of the myth-speaking douchey yoga teachers in my
neighborhood. In other words, it's stylized beyond reality. It creates a
world of its own and works brilliantly within its own context. In a
weird way, The Crow is an inversion of the Warren Beatty film Dick Tracy, which is another neo-noir set in its own unique world.

It's impossible not to be on Eric Draven's side. He's a walking raw
nerve. He can brutalize a corrupt pawn broker and heal a junkie's
poisoned body. He's pain and rage and empathy incarnate. At his most
insane, he reminds me of Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker.
There's a scene where Draven interrupts a gang meeting looking for his
last victim. When the Amazing Interracial Gang cut him in two, he
recovers and massacres the room to My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult's
song "After The Flesh." Midway through the massacre he stops, picks up a
sword, and says "you're all going to die" in a dead man's ice-cold
voice. It thrilled me in a way I can only describe as visceral.

Yet, as influential as the movie was to my younger self, I I think I outgrew it.

The
big issue I have with the movie is the whole idea of True Love. Eric
and Shelly were perfect in every way. We see less than five minutes of
their entire relationship and it consists of them being adorable, her
smiling down on him like an angel, and the pair of them goofing around
with masks and burned food. We never see them disagree or doubt or
fight. In other words, we never see them act like two human beings in a
real relationship. These days, I think it's interesting how we never
really learn anything about Shelly. She's a cypher. She exists to be
perfect, to be raped and murdered, and to be the ideal that inspires an
ultimately horrible massacre. She isn't a person, she's a statue on a
pedestal.

I don't have a lot of patience for avengers these days.
There's always something patriarchal about them. You sullied my
woman/family and took them away from me, so I have a man's right to do
whatever horrible thing I want to in order to avenge it. I'm also too
old for fairy tales. I'm too old for simplicity. "True love" doesn't
exist. Real love is lumpy and complicated and painful because people are
lumpy and complicated and painful, but there's an authentic beauty in
that fragility. It has more weight because it has more humanity.

If I were rewriting the screenplay of The Crow,
I'd make it abundantly clear that it wasn't Eric Draven running around
in the tragedy mask. Eric Draven remains moldering in the ground. The
thing moving through the city butchering people is an idea, a figment,
and it commits atrocity because it's a broken thing created by pain. In
other words, it's a slightly more noble version of the girl from The Ring.

I
am looking forward to the remake, if it ever actually comes into being.
There's a lot of meat on these bones. Grief and anger are central human
emotions and, in many ways, The Crow is one of the purer
revenge stories. Because Eric Draven is unliving and insane, he is
Vengeance Incarnate. There's a line in the comic that always stuck with
me (yeah, I know the comic is significantly different) where he asks a
person if he sees Eric's smile. It's sad and evil. Sad because he's
utterly alone. Evil because he's dead and he still moves. You see? A
dead man visits you.